Displaying items by tag: Enclosures

Anyone who’s been involved with PC building and modding for any length of time has seen their share of oddities when it comes to PC cases.  These are the first thing people see after all, and as such they were some of the fist things to start taking different forms as the industry evolved.  It was and still is a dynamic market, and as the designers and PR people put out products that they think we the consumer will appreciate and spend our money on, there inevitably come along some examples that are… out of the ordinary.

I’ve had the privilege of watching the PC industry change over the years, especially from an aesthetic standpoint.  I’ve seen PC cases go from the beige and boring to the neon and gaudy to the sleek and subtle and back again.  Personally I prefer the sleek and subtle, adding in “large” whenever possible.  I recently got my hands on an excellent example with the Urban T81 full-tower case from Thermaltake.

PC enclosure reviews are not exactly the most exciting things on the internet. In far too many cases (no pun intended… ok well maybe) we find that the differences between one company and another is wholly cosmetic and are not much more than fancy side panels and extra plastic to give the case a different shape. This is not to say that there is no innovation in the market, just that really innovative features and designs are not all that common. One company that has recently stood out is In Win. Over the last few months In Win has released some very novel and innovative cases. These have not been your standard “hey I have more HDD bays and fans” type of innovations, but actually new and innovative designs and even materials (like a glass case). Today we are taking a look at one of them, the In Win 901. This is a very interesting SFF case that just might be one of the coolest enclosure designs we have seen in a very long time.

This year SilverStone has prepared another interesting case from the Raven line, whose model RV01 was introduced back in 2008. The new edition carries a simple label Raven Z, and also belongs to the category of SFF cases for compact configuration based on motherboards in mini-ITX form factor and SFX power supplies.

The computer case has come a long way since its beige-box inception.  Anyone who’s been lucky enough to be around since that time has had the joy of watching it evolve from that mid-sized invisible-by-design box to the incredible array of enclosures we have today.  Granted, the hardware is a lot more varied today, but that doesn’t begin to account for the options we have before us as builders.